Kyiv, Ukraine. In War-torn Ukraine, this is Alya Shabaanovich Gali, a popular doctor with a line of patients waiting to see him. To his family thousands of miles away in the besieged Gaza StripHe is Alaa Shabaan Abu Ghali, the one who left.
Over the past 30 years, these identities rarely had reason to merge: Gali moved amid instability in Gaza, settled in her new home in kyiv, adopted a different name to better fit the local language, and married a ukrainian woman. Through calls, he kept in touch with his mother and his siblings in Gaza. southernmost city, Rafah. But, above all, their lives ran in parallel.
In February 2022, The Russian invasion of Ukraine plunged Gali’s life into chaos, with airstrikes and missile attacks. Almost 20 months later, the War between Israel and Hamas. turned his hometown into a hell, uprooting his family.
Both are violent conflicts that have altered regional and global balances of power, but they can seem worlds apart as they continue. Ukraine has attacked its allies for coming to the defense of Israel while his own troops languished at the front. The Palestinians have denounced the double standard in international support. In each place, rampant bombing and intense fighting. they have killedtens of thousands and destroyed entire cities.
In Gali’s life, wars converge. A month ago, her nephew was killed in an Israeli attack while searching for food. Weeks later, a Russian missile tore through her private clinic where she has worked for most of her professional life. Colleagues and patients died at her feet.
“I was in a war there and now I’m in a war here,” said Gali, 48, standing inside the hollowed-out wing of the medical center as workers swept up glass and debris. “Half of my heart and mind are here and the other half is there.
“You witness war and destruction with your family in Palestine, and you see war and destruction with your own eyes, here in Ukraine.”
There is an Arabic saying to describe the youngest son of a family: the last grape in the bunch. Gali’s mother would say that the last one is the sweetest; The youngest, 10 years old, was her favorite.
When Gali was nine years old, her father died. Money was scarce, but Gali excelled in school and dreamed of becoming a doctor, specializing in fertility, after seeing his relatives having difficulty conceiving.
In 1987, the first intifada or Palestinian uprising broke out in Gaza and the bank of the west. Gali joined the youth arm of the Fatah Movement, a party that espouses a nationalist ideology, long before the Islamist group Hamas would take root. One by one, the friends were arrested and interrogated; some went to prison, others took up arms.
Gali had a choice: stay and suffer the same fate, or leave.
There was good news: an opportunity to study medicine in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Gali tearfully said goodbye to his family, not knowing if he would see them again.
He traveled to Moscow hoping to catch a train. Instead, he discovered that Almaty was no longer an option. But there was a place in Kyiv.
And so young Gali arrived in Ukraine in 1992, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It was like leaving one chaos after another, he said: “The country was in a state of chaos, without law and with very difficult living conditions.”
Many colleagues left. Gali stayed and enrolled in medical school.
In the Ukrainian language, there is no equivalent for the notoriously difficult glottal consonants of Arabic. Thus, in Kyiv, Alaa became Alya. He adopted a patronymic middle name, adding the usual suffix to his father’s name: Shabaanovich.
While learning Russian (spoken by most Ukrainians who had lived under the Soviet Union), Gali had trouble running errands. The neighbors helped. Through them he met his wife. They would have three children.
He finished medical school and became a gynecologist specializing in fertility. The first days of his career were long and he treated dozens of patients. Eventually, he landed a practice at Adonis Medical Center, where he thrived.
As Gali drives to work, listening to songs in Arabic, he passes kyiv’s Maidan, a square where anti-government protests set the stage for Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014. Remember that that year there was also a war in Gaza.
Gali delivers the lyrics as Ukrainian street signs whiz by: “You keep crushing us, oh world.”
On July 8, Gali was working, but his mind was on Gaza.
A week earlier, a relative reached out: Gali’s 12-year-old niece had been killed as Israeli tanks advanced toward the edge of the Mawasi camp for displaced Palestinians, northwest of Rafah. Like tens of thousands of Gazans, his family had fled there on foot after Israel appointed him humanitarian zone.
Gali was already in mourning. A nephew, Fathi, was murdered the previous month. Gali saw it himself, he said, on television: the lifeless body of his nephew on the screen, headlines in Arabic. He described Fathi’s image and clothing to a relative, who confirmed it was him.
Their deaths weighed heavily on Gali. for nine monthsHe had lived in fear for his family, because of a text message that said they had all been murdered.
That day air attacks were heard at the medical center throughout the morning. Before greeting her next patient, she shared a few words with the center’s director. She had just passed Ojmadyt Children’s Hospital, hit hours earlier by a missile: a terrible sight: the largest pediatric center in Ukraine is in ruins, he told him. He told her about the death of his niece and her nephew, the darkness of her grief.
Not long after, Gali’s world became even darker.
A Russian missile hurtled toward the center, causing an explosion that destroyed the third and fourth floors.
Gali worked in the room. In the dense cloud of debris, he looked for shadowy figures covered in blood. He saw a patient and, using her phone as a light, pulled her out from under the collapsed ceiling, while colleagues and others died around her: nine dead in total.
He took the woman to his office to wait for rescuers. Among the corpses lying on the ground, she found a colleague, Viktor Bragutsa, bleeding profusely. Gali could not revive him.
A room containing patient documents had been reduced to rubble, and its records spanning decades had gone up in smoke.
He felt pangs of deja vu.
For months I had seen images of the Gaza war. It was as if they had somehow invaded her life in Ukraine.
“Nothing is sacred,” he said. “Killing doctors, killing children, killing civilians: this is the scenario we face.”
Two weeks later, Gali stood in the same place, looking at the bombed walls while workers sifted through the rubble. “What can I feel?” he said “Pain. Nothing else.”
The center director’s office is destroyed. So is the reception area. The ultrasound machines and operating tables were in disarray.
He stayed in Ukraine, he did not evacuate his family; she took solace in his office, helping patients. And yet, he said, she will stay.
He knows that there is no safe place for his family in Gaza. evacuate.
Communicating is not easy due to telecommunications outages. Weeks pass without news, until a nephew or niece finds enough signal to tell them that they are alive.
“No matter how difficult and impossible the situation is,” he said, “his words are always filled with laughter, patience and gratitude to God.
“I’m here, feeling the weight.”
This story originally appeared on ABCNews.go.com read the full story
